Power Shortages and Changes in the Structure of Electricity Production in Poland in 2015-2019

Objectives: The paper aims at emphasizing the differences between Poland and the EU-28 states with the level of security of electricity supply. Background: The level of energy safety is influenced by many factors: diversification of the structure of energy carriers in the domestic balance, degree of diversification of external sources of supply, technical condition and efficiency of devices and installations of the transmission and distribution systems for fuels and energy. In this context, the security of electricity supply can be considered at the level of: energy availability, power, reliability of supply and quality of supplied energy. Expected Results: The study is focused on the aspect of the risk of energy shortages in the Polish energy system. Two shortage incidents in Poland (August 2015 and June 2020) were analyzed in terms of the risk factor and in the context of structural changes in the energy market. The paper investigates the intensity of changes in the sector structure of energy production (using a measure of structural changes), then compares the sector structure of the primary energy production in Poland with the sector structure in the whole EU-28 using object similarity measure and finally evaluates the competition on the Polish electricity market using the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) as an index generation concentration in power sector. Implications: The results of work can be used as a situational analysis for tackling security of electricity supply.